Please Share Your Work with People Who Are Blind

The Kindle2 Has Added One More Tool

Authors, reach a group of voracious and engaged readers: people who are blind or partially sighted.

Technology has exploded the field of accessible reading beyond the old half speed "talking book" discs and recorded cassettes. People who cannot read print now can receive their reading materials via dowloadable books from a few different sources. Whereas it used to take months or even longer for a book to make its way into a format a person who is print disabled to read, now we can have access to books almost as quickly as the general public. Make sure your books are part of this cornucopia opening up.

I am an author, and I am also a severely visually impaired reader. Once upon a time I had to wait for reading material to be made available through the National Library Service (NLS) of the Library of Congress. The developing ebook and related technologies have changed that very much for the better!

You can make sure your books reach people like me by making them available through the following digital formats:

1. Digital text. You can make your own book available as a text or accessible PDF format through your own web site, but if you understandably worry about piracy, consider going through an organization like BookShare.org. Under the Chaffee Amendment to the copyright law in the U.S. an organization can make books accessible to people who are certified as blind or otherwise print impaired (dyslexic, for example.) Access is limited only to those people who could not pick up your book and read it and no one else.

For more information look at http://www.bookshare.org/about/donateBooks and click on Publishers or Authors. Tell them Nan Hawthorne sent you.

2. Kindle. The Kindle2 is not yet fully accessible as the speech output available for books and magazines is not functional for the device's menus. However, people with low vision or who have help can still access the books. The voices are excellent. There has been some wrangling about whether making your book available for speech output will cut into your audio book sales. Let me assure you that few sighted people will opt for the computer voice over a professionally narrated book. In fact, I think Amazon.com is rather optimistic that this will catch on. In the meantime, people like me benefit, because I am used to worse reading voices than Kindle's. You can block Amazon.com from allowing your book to be readable by speech engines, but I ask you not to. Put your book on Kindle and let us h ave at it.

To learn about putting your book on Kindle, see http://dtp.amazon.com. You can ask your publisher to arrange this or do it yourself.

3. Publish an ebook. An ebook can be as simple as a plain text version of your book. To make a better product though, you can look into a number of resources. Self Publish eBooks is a site with information on software to produce ebooks, ebook publishers, and advice on all aspects of ebook publishing and distribution. Just make sure when you are either creating tyour own ebook for sale or going through an ebook publisher that the final file is in a format acfessible to to screen readinf and braille output applications that blind people use to access their computers.

This is just one of the sites that can advise you on self publishing an ebook: http://www.selfpublishebooks.com/index.html

I also recommend becoming a member of the Independent Authors Guild. It is free. Even if you publish through a a traditional publisher, this group of mostly independently published authors share a ton of information on all aspects of publishing including marketing ideas. Most traditionally published authors receive little or no help with marketing from their publishers, so learn from us what we have come up with as a matter of necessity.

But why give your book away at all? You aren't necessarily giving your book away. You can sell ebooks and certainly you can get your cut in Kindle sales. But even if you donate the book to a group like BookShare or even give a digital text version to people who are print impaired, remember you are giving to someone who would not have bought your book anyway. It simply would not be accessible to them. Nevertheless, they do talk to other people about books they enjoyed and buy books as gifts. You lose nothing and you gain some excellent karma and the potential for more sales. Plus you will have reached a particularly appreciative group of readers. Just come by AccessibleWorld.org's many book discussion groups to hear for yourself.

Jon the discussion at AccessibleWorld.org by plugging in your microphone and downloading the safe chat application at http://www.acccessibleworld.org .

I personally thank you for taking away the sting of walking into my county library and knowing that only a tiny number of the treasures that occupy all those shelves is accessible to me.

Nan Hawthorne
http://www.nanhawthorne.com
Write to me at hawthorne@nanhawthorne.com.